Book of the Little Axe

by Lauren Francis-Sharma

  I was feelin like a cheat for not tellin how I broke with Thompson, how Id up and run from Meleanos. “I was in New Spain, workin for a man who looked to have everything and still wanted more.” I watched Demas and wondered if maybe I was speakin to and bout the same kinda man. “But I figure every man’s gotta have ambitions.”

  Demas looked like he was decidin whether to be offended. He uncrossed his legs and leaned over his knees. “True. A man must not be idle. But his ambitions should not be to the detriment of those he should be loving.” He said this like he knowed I needed him to make himself different from all the other men I met. Eve and Rosa looked to be proud to have that man as their father. I wondered what it might be like to have somebody be proud to claim me. “And what about the rest of your family?”

  “I aint got people to claim, really. My Pa told me that my mother was Crow Indian. Apsáalooke.”

  “Apsáalooke?” Rosa said.

  “Means ‘Children of the Long-Beaked Bird,’” I said, though I still aint sure that was true. “Some say the long-beaked bird wasnt a crow but some kinda water bird that dove into the sea, pulled up a plant from the bottom and made the earth. The bird made a whole world for himself.” I gulped the last bit a my tea. “That dont seem much different from this world you and your girls looked to have made here.”

  IX

  Kullyspell, Oregon Country

  1

  1830

  One step, two steps, three steps. Each afternoon, Ma forced Victor out of bed and made him walk the plank floor. It had been twelve weeks since they’d arrived at Kullyspell, and the sun seemed more often to find shelter behind trees, for winter was coming. They would need to make new clothes, gather food, ensure there was enough fat for light. Ma told him she’d need his help to get through it.

  During their fourth week, Ma had fashioned a brace and an underpinning to help Victor walk. He had set it aside, complained that it rubbed his skin raw so Ma had lifted him, his legs stretching longer than hers, until she buckled beneath him, forcing her to prop him against the threshold to catch her breath. “You want to die out there?” Her eyes had bulged, the lines in her neck, strained. “Is that what you want?”

  Victor did not know what he wanted.

  During their fifth week at the post, Victor had reached the part of Creadon’s diary where Creadon had been nearly buried alive. He stopped before he knew whether they had found the cattle. At first Victor believed he’d paused because he wished to savor the story, to live with it as long as he could, but soon Victor realized that he’d grown restless with it, angry with it, for he felt, as he read the words, that Creadon had been teasing him, his diary holding out a world Victor would never know, places and people and a time that were not accessible to him.

  It was the beginning of the twelfth week in the cabin when Ma clasped her hands, exasperated. “You don’t want to get better? Must I always push you, carry you, cover you? I’m tired too, Victor. Your legs are still attached to your body. Look down and see them. They still work.”

  “I’m not ready.”

  “What is ready?” Ma said. “Without pain? Is that what you mean?” She shook her head, then narrowed her eyes. “You will never live without pain again. That fact has nothing to do with your legs.”

  One step, two steps, three steps.

  Victor couldn’t make it to step four. Not to the fireplace they’d begun to need as the nights grew cooler. Not to the plank on the other side of the door. His hip bones throbbed, the friction inside his knees could have kindled fire, and the drag of his legs was as if lodgepoles had been tied to his ankles. Victor wished to tell Ma about his pain. He wanted to tell her that he thought of Like-Wind every day; tell her what he’d discovered from Creadon’s diary, the knowing and all its unpleasantness—how he was now frightened that there were more people in the world who looked at him the way the girl had looked at him, and how frustrating and infuriating it would be if this proved true. But a warrior could not speak such brittle words, and even if he could, Ma would not hear them. She wanted only for Victor to take steps. But to where? And to what end?

  2

  Victor could not see the whites of Ma’s eyes. She had shut the window, and only fine traces of a blue morning light fought off the cabin’s darkness. The air felt moist, hectic, reluctant to cool. Sweat bubbled like an upwelling at the top of his head. It was her thumb and her index finger pressed into the supple sides of his neck. Her other hand lay over his mouth. His right wrist had been tied with red hemp stems hooked to the window shutter. Victor set the palm of his left hand onto her head, nudging her away. Some pressure released and he gulped air, only to have her fight off his blind hand and veer back stronger. She planted her fingers like poles in the open prairie of his neck. Poles bearing flags of victory. As he writhed beneath her, he remembered that Ma had told him she was tired, angry that he would not stand on his own. Step four. That was all she’d wanted. She would rid herself of him, get back to his sisters and to Father. She would tell them Victor died bravely, fighting off Like-Wind and the evil Frenchmen. It would be a story for the ages.

  Except Victor didn’t want that to be his story.

  He clawed at her face, catching tiny pellets of skin under the beds of his nails, earning himself another gulp of air. She fought back harder, grunting, then threw the hemp blanket onto his face, holding down the edges with her hands. Victor drove fists into the sides of her face, knowing all the contours of her, even in that darkness.

  Victor sat now against the interior wall, the acrid taste of bile in his throat, his neck as sore as if it’d been feasted upon, his thoughts still unclear hours after Ma must have untied him. He watched a silver spider thread the corner of what looked to be a rectangular web. Victor didn’t know how long he’d been sitting there, how long since Ma had left him, but he guessed nearly a half day, for the sun had weakened and the shadows grown tall.

  Step five. Victor opened the door of the post and rediscovered the world. The crisp chur-chur of the bluebird; the sky pocked white, as the high gale of wind swirled the tops of the ponderosas and rickety aspens that grew uphill. Stumbling along, it wasn’t altogether clear where he was. Q’lispe or Ktunaxa territory. Grasses and mats of creeping juniper grew like wild hairs atop chestnut-grey soil until meeting stout shrubs that seemed to have agreed not to encroach. As he walked farther, Victor hoped to see the top of Ma’s head or the windlass of a well, but he saw nothing but an old log storehouse before a backdrop of unfamiliar wilderness and a lake that rippled as though hungry.

  Victor closed his eyes and listened to the trees that spoke differently there. They called to him, told him to brace himself against them, and he took cautious steps as they steadied him, nudged him to the next of them, until he came to the well.

  Victor peered into its mouth and imagined the water, still and waiting and cold. He shouldn’t have been frightened, but fright can only be reasoned with if one has never been frightened. The ground surrounding the well was moist and infirm, as though the hole had been backfilled with loose soil. It was a grave lying in wait, he thought. He limped around it, and on the other side, found Ma’s buckets. The water inside was not yet sun warmed.

  “Ma?” Victor spoke down into the well. When he raised his eyes, he saw a dead bird, partially covered by caked birch leaves on the ground near his foot. Yellow breasted and horribly delicate, its neck snapped and its little black eyes jutted like pumiced stones, as though it’d been shocked to find itself in such a state. Victor sat in the earth beside it and heard the hawk bellow overhead. He thought it a sign but didn’t know of what, and so he rose to his feet, wound his way between silver-leafed black cottonwoods and the creamy trunks of paper birches and searched.

  “Ma?” He was not so much calling her to come as he was asking her to reveal herself.

  And so she did.

  Still shrouded by trees, Victor watched Ma in the earth, clawing her fingernails like hooks, revealing the reddened clay beneath the topsoil.
Under the shadows of a cluster of blue-needled spruces, Ma grunted, punched, bit her lip as if to restrain a gruesome cry, folded herself like a heavy sheet of skin, her hair standing as if each strand were shouting to the First Maker. Victor had never heard a moan that he could feel beneath his feet.

  3

  When she spotted him, he was near the well, pretending he’d been waiting there all along. Ma, with her musket, moccasins, and a spear that held two wide-eyed trout, chastised him for having left the post.

  “What were you thinking?” She gripped his face and peered at his neck. “Look at you. You’re a mess. Did you stumble?” She handed him the musket and the fish, and she took up the bucket. “All of a sudden you can walk and you decide to come all the way behind God’s back to hurt yourself?”

  Upon their return, she insisted that Victor set himself down on a high stump next to the pot. She placed the coverless Spanish Bible onto his lap as though he needed a better god. She worked in such a way that seemed a plea for silence, feeding the fire whenever she thought Victor cold, scaling and gutting fish, gathering red clover and wild carrots for a fish broth, a specialty of hers that had always delighted Father though Apsáalooke did not regularly eat fish. “My ocean woman,” Father would say, clapping his hands as the broth dribbled down his chin.

  Ma searched inside the bowl of a wide leaf for hyssop and dill for the pot.

  “I’m feeling better now.” Victor set the Bible on the ground, drawing Ma’s attention to it, though she said nothing.

  “I can see.”

  “This morning … why did you do that? Would you have killed me?”

  Ma flitted her eyes as if to make light of his words, then grinned. “I want to kill you all the time.”

  “This morning, before you disappeared, you were fighting me.” Victor said, noticing, suddenly, that Ma had no visible wounds.

  Her face folded into itself. “I left you sleeping. I went to catch fish.”

  Victor wondered now if he had dreamt it all and if he had, wondered what kind of meaning was in a dream of a mother trying to murder her only son. “You never tell me about home.”

  “I am certain your sisters are fine.”

  “Not that home,” he said. “Trinidad.”

  She stirred the broth with the long wooden spoon. The smoke sweated her cheeks. “What more is there to tell? Shadows fall the same there.”

  Ma dipped a bowl into the hot soup, then wiped the outside of it on her skirt. Victor followed with his bowl and, together, they sat and ate in the quiet of dusk.

  The next morning Victor expected he would find Ma gone again. He stretched for the diary, felt ready for it once more until Ma cleared her throat from the chair. Victor offered her a nervous grin and took in her months-tired eyes.

  “My father wished for me to marry,” she started. “He invited a young man to come for Sunday lunch.”

  Victor sat up, forgetting the diary. “You didn’t like him?”

  “I didn’t know him. Papá made me cook for him and his uncle,” she said. “I made broth.”

  Victor smiled, for he too liked the fish broth.

  “I almost killed the boy’s uncle,” she said. “I put so much pepper sauce in the broth that his heart stopped.” Ma wiped the corners of her eyes, then wiped her mouth, before Victor realized that she was laughing. Really laughing. “Papá was so upset.”

  Victor laughed too, though he’d never tasted this pepper thing she spoke of. “What was he like?”

  “The boy?”

  “No, your Papá.”

  “You would love that man. And if he were here with us, he would love you, Victor, in a way that any love coming after it would seem not worth the trouble.” She scooted to the edge of the chair and crossed her feet. “He was magnificent, strong and confounding, always confounding. I like to think his love for us took him by surprise. There were so many things I didn’t know. So many things I wish I could’ve asked. Why? So many whys. He was a hard worker, a protector, but why wasn’t that enough?” Ma seemed to think carefully of what more she would say. “In the face of all the conflict on our little island, my Papá did everything he could to keep us together, to keep us from harm. What more could I have asked?”

  “Then why did you leave?”

  Perhaps she wouldn’t tell Victor everything, for he had asked for the end rather than the beginning. Ma rose from the chair, and Victor thought she would set out for more lake water and wander about the shore as she had often done, leaving him there with his thoughts, but instead Ma lay beside him, settling into the feather bed, and Victor could smell her morning-washed skin and her breath sweet with ripe berries, and he thought then that there must be no greater comfort in all the many worlds than a mother’s body wrapped about yours.

  X

  Isle of Trinidad

  1

  1812

  Demas Rendón was nothing if not polite and he would never have sent Creadon Rampley off into the darkness. That first evening, Papá asked Creadon Rampley if he would like to stay. And the next day, after Creadon Rampley helped Papá reorganize his workspace, helped Papá groom the horses, helped Papá loose dirt for his new water well, helped Papá with everything Papá could not do alone, Papá asked him to stay for another lunch, for another tea, and finally Papá offered him the muggy hayloft, alongside Eve’s dresses, for as long as Creadon Rampley wished to work.

  Creadon Rampley was a stranger, a prospector, a wanderer. To Rosa, a man with too much purpose and a man with no purpose were equally dangerous, and Creadon Rampley seemed both. Yet he also seemed to be doing everything right, even while Rosa was certain everything was wrong.

  One early morning while alone in the shop, Rosa believed she’d uncovered the truth. “He’s after Eve,” Rosa said to Papá.

  “He is a nice, respectful young man. Eve could do worse,” Papá said.

  Rosa blushed with surprise.

  “This is why Eve takes to him. He’s been places she’s not been, done t’ings none of us have. He’s unafraid. Men like this are being made no more.”

  “Unafraid? He’s fearful of everything. You can’t see that, Papá?”

  “And yet he still rises each day,” he said. “That is not fear, that is la valentía.”

  Papá turned from Rosa and walked to the grindstone which he’d had to build to replace what he’d lost in the raid, along with smaller, more efficient instruments including a three-legged forge that burned wood at its base. Without proper roof ventilation, Papá had had to perform much of his smithing near the door.

  “But he’s not one of us.”

  “In his heart, sí, he is. Here, he is beginning to learn this about himself.” The muscles between Papá’s shoulders jumped like small fishes as he pushed the grindstone from the stable wall.

  “He is learning nothing but to be in my way,” Rosa said.

  Papá turned so that Rosa could now see a sliver of his face. He appeared slightly bemused by her frustration. “Your mudda has sent us help. The t’ree of us couldn’t do this all alone.”

  Once more, he leaned into the grindstone set within a heavy four-legged stand. It moved, albeit begrudgingly, and though Papá did not ask for assistance and might not, in his chipped-from-something-solid way, have wished for it, Rosa leaned alongside him and helped reposition it from the wall to the middle of the floor where it could freely turn. He breathed heavily and Rosa felt saddened that the space that he had had to carve from the stable for his work was so regrettably small, that it required him to move tools and equipment several times a day.

  “Even if it is not in the form we wished”—he fanned his face with the brim of his hat—“my prayers were answered.”

  Rosa was disappointed, and yet she could not deny that in the weeks since Creadon Rampley’s arrival, the list of things to be done each day was cut to a third by noon. Señor Rampley was methodical and strong, did not prattle as he worked, and spoke only to ask what more he could do. He knew carpentry, hunted so well they o
ften ate fresh meat at lunch, was a walking compass (never once had he been turned around) and masterful fisherman (could catch them with his bare hands!), and wielded a cutlass like a caner. Like Rosa, he was of the outdoors.

  “Tomorrow, I wish for you to take Señor Rampley out with the team,” Papá said.

  “That’s my job. I set them out, you and I bring them in together.”

  “Not tomorrow.” Papá placed the blade of a ploughshare against the grindstone and waited for Rosa to take her leave.

  Rosa woke an hour earlier than usual. She hoped Creadon Rampley would still be resting, but when she arrived at the stable, he was there with that strange stupid smile wearing those silly wide-legged trousers, alongside the horses that he had already roped. Rosa recalled the day he’d arrived, when Eve had told Rosa how much she liked those trousers, how striking they were on a man with such powerful form. Now, the strong-legged man with the ridiculous trousers and that dumb grin waited for Rosa with saddle in hand. He reached for her seat, as if to assist, but she shook her head.

  “Mornin’,” he said.

  Rosa mounted, made sure the two horses she led were secure on the line, then looked down at him. “What do you know about mustangs, Señor Rampley?”

  His eyes were filled with anticipation. “I know they’re horses.”

  “They’re not horses, Señor. What you call a horse would be closer to a dog.” Rosa wished to tell him that her mustangs were not what most considered “mustangs,” that her mustangs were true to the meaning of mustang. They could survive on less feed than a human child for weeks, they were good in a stall, good in pasture, didn’t stumble when the soil was rocky, didn’t slow on a march uphill, and would not colic quickly when thirsty. But Rosa believed her efforts to elucidate would all be wasted, for she was certain Creadon Rampley would not be there long.